Hermione Lee has created a portrait - rich in detail, epic in scope - that lets us know Virginia Woolf as we never have before: how she looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, how she wrote. This book gives us a vivid sense of the texture of Woolf's daily life - her houses and habits, money and servants, parties and talk. And through her own words and newly published letters between family members and friends, we gain a fresh and penetrating understanding.

Of Woolf's formative personal relationships: with her parents and siblings; with her husband, Leonard; with writers she edgily admired, such as T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield; and with the women who changed her life, including Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth. Lee casts aside the misleading received images of Woolf as an ethereal and emotionally dependent creature, and takes us deep inside her inner being. We see a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered.

From a terrifying chronic illness and wrestled with the contradictions of her own character. And we see a tougher Woolf than we have previously known: a woman acutely alert to the realities of her times, a committed feminist, an opponent of every sort of political and intellectual fascism. At the same time, Lee offers an unequalled insight into the connections between Woolf's life and work.

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Hermione Lee has created a portrait - rich in detail, epic in scope - that lets us know Virginia Woolf as we never have before: how she looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, how she wrote. This book gives us a vivid sense of the texture of Woolf's daily life - her houses and habits, money and servants, parties and talk. And through her own words and newly published letters between family members and friends, we gain a fresh and penetrating understanding.

Of Woolf's formative personal relationships: with her parents and siblings; with her husband, Leonard; with writers she edgily admired, such as T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield; and with the women who changed her life, including Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth. Lee casts aside the misleading received images of Woolf as an ethereal and emotionally dependent creature, and takes us deep inside her inner being. We see a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered.

From a terrifying chronic illness and wrestled with the contradictions of her own character. And we see a tougher Woolf than we have previously known: a woman acutely alert to the realities of her times, a committed feminist, an opponent of every sort of political and intellectual fascism. At the same time, Lee offers an unequalled insight into the connections between Woolf's life and work.

"Hermione Lee has created a portrait - rich in detail, epic in scope - that lets us know Virginia Woolf as we never have before: how she looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, how she wrote. This book gives us a vivid sense of the texture of Woolf's daily life - her houses and habits, money and servants, parties and talk. And through her own words and newly published letters between family members and friends, we gain a fresh and penetrating understanding."@en

"Of Woolf's formative personal relationships: with her parents and siblings; with her husband, Leonard; with writers she edgily admired, such as T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield; and with the women who changed her life, including Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth. Lee casts aside the misleading received images of Woolf as an ethereal and emotionally dependent creature, and takes us deep inside her inner being. We see a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered."@en

"From a terrifying chronic illness and wrestled with the contradictions of her own character. And we see a tougher Woolf than we have previously known: a woman acutely alert to the realities of her times, a committed feminist, an opponent of every sort of political and intellectual fascism. At the same time, Lee offers an unequalled insight into the connections between Woolf's life and work."@en